As I have mentioned elsewhere on this site, I was trained in mechanical engineering, a discipline in which I have a master’s degree. Studying engineering was relatively easy because I had a flair for mathematics and because I found it moderately stimulating intellectually (I liked thermodynamics a great deal, particularly the concept of entropy, including its philosophical aspects). After leaving school and starting to work as an engineer, however, I slowly recognized that I had little interest in the discipline and in the mechanistic view of the world that is its foundation. After a couple of years, I moved away from engineering by leveraging my university degrees into positions that related to technology in a general way but without the quantitative aspects that I disliked.
During this same period, I also began to realize that while my years in college had given me a decent technical training, it was training merely and not what I considered an adequate education. So I set about educating myself mostly through reading. One of the most important sources for my self-education in those early years was the journal MANAS, an eight-page paper than came out every couple of weeks.
MANAS was primarily the work of one man, Henry Geiger. Geiger began publishing the paper, as he called it, in 1949 and continued until a few months before his death at age 80, writing almost all of the pieces himself. Each issue comprised five parts: a lead article, a review sometimes of a contemporary book and other times of a historical work, an editorial, a short essay relating generally to education, and another review that tended toward contemporary issues. The essays quoted extensively from the works cited and in doing so offered a fine introduction to a particular writer and his or her thinking.
It was MANAS that first introduced me to writers like Ivan Illich, Wendell Berry, John Holt, Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, E.F. Schumacher, and Rabindranath Tagore, and expanded my knowledge of thinkers like Plato, Emerson, Gandhi, and Tolstoy. I read it for a decade from the late 70s until it ceased publication in 1988. In fact, I still have most of those issues in a large plastic tote.
Here is the statement of purpose that appeared in every issue:
MANAS is a journal of independent inquiry, concerned with the study of the principles which move world society on its present course, and with searching for contrasting principles- that may be capable of supporting intelligent idealism under the conditions of the twentieth century. MANAS is concerned, therefore, with philosophy and with practical psychology, in as direct and simple a manner as the editors and contributors can write. The word “manas” comes from a common root suggesting “man” or “the thinker.” Editorial articles are unsigned, since MANAS wishes to present ideas and viewpoints, not personalities.
In 1971, a selection of pieces from the first two decades of the paper was published as The MANAS Reader. In the late 90s, a decade after MANAS ceased publication, a group of the journal’s supporters gathered all of the issues into a CD along with an index. I have both the reader and the CD. The digitized material is also available on line through the Schumacher Center for a New Economics at this URL:
http://www.manasjournal.org/intro.php
That page also offers background information on MANAS and Henry Geiger. I encourage you to go there, read about MANAS, and sample some back issues.